Blind Photographers: an (im)material quest into the spatial experience of blind children

Abstract

In the context of inclusive design this paper reports on a photo-ethnographic study that is part of a larger inquiry on haptic qualities in the built environment. To stimulate conversation with children born blind about their haptic spatial experiences, we invited them to take pictures of their daily living environment. Place of action was a school for children with a visual or hearing impairment or autism. The pictures taken by the blind children offer a unique perspective on how they experience the school environment. Non-visual triggers to take a picture turned out to be tangible (haptic, olfactory, auditory) and intangible (memories and knowledge) in nature. Besides offering insights on non-visual stimuli in the school, this study shows photo-ethnography as a useful approach to communicate about sensory experience with children born blind and to overcome lack of vocabulary to explicit these experiences. Moreover, using the camera turned out to provoke sensory experiences and memories in general and revealed details on haptic perception in particular.